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Rockawayish Beach Adventure

Recently I went to the beach with one of my favorite people ever. We planned on going to Rockaway, so took the train there. But we didn’t get off and take the shuttle train down that way (I’d only been once and it was her 1st time – we watched all of the people with cooler bags and flipflops get off the train then looked at the map) so ended up just getting off after we realized this, when we found a stop that looked close to the water.

There didn’t seem to be much around where we were, for new york being so populated, we walked by a school, and some construction. Some giant apartment buildings were visible in the close distance. But the train was very close to the beach, we got off at B36 but ended up at B35. B for beach!

We walked down a street that began to crumble as we moved toward the ocean, the sidewalk disappearing, cracked, in weeds and wildflowers. Families holding towels walked this way too, all of us walking in the street when the sidewalk ended.

We walked up onto that long wooden boardwalk for a bit, realizing this was probably the origin of that ‘under the boardwalk’ song! I grew up in a town with a theme park, The Boardwalk, so I always thought that’s where the song came from. But miles of slatted wood walkway creating the only shade on this long and desolate beach really seems like a better reason.

We sat on the empty beach for a bit (there were less than 50 people on all of the beach we could see in either direction – this is new york so that was really weird), picnicked, jumped around in the water for a while and then realized there were 100000000s of tiny live squirmy multicolored clams floating in the water, with their siphons out and wiggling. So we stopped that jumping on the millions of mollusks part. It was weird to see so many floating violet, pink, and yellow clams.

By this time it was too hot, even under the boardwalk, so after a little more walking we headed back to the more populated parts of New York City.